The protection of intellectual property rights has become increasingly important to the entertainment industry due to the increased use of consumer electronic devices. While these electronic devices have opened new channels of distribution of content (e.g., music, television programming, movies, etc.), they have also increased the possibility of unauthorized copy and distribution of that content. While content providers want to distribute their content to the widest possible audience, they also want to limit access to this content, if possible, to authorized users only. As a result, content providers seek methods for protecting their intellectual property rights that are not excessively inconvenient for authorized end users.
Digital media offer several advantages over analog media such as high quality, easy editing, and high fidelity copying. As a result, digital electronic devices are increasingly popular with consumers. However, the ease with which high quality copies of digital information can be duplicated and distributed has led to the development of a variety of tools for the protection of intellectual property rights. Digital watermarking is a process that adds data, called a watermark, into a digital object such that the watermark can later be extracted or detected to make an assertion about the object. Digital watermarking is frequently used to identify a copyright holder or to verify the integrity of a digital object.
The process for digitally watermarking a movie requires a substantial amount of computer processing. Typically, each frame in a piece of digital content is watermarked to provide the greatest amount of copyright protection to a digital content provider. Because this is a lengthy process, performing the watermarking process upon the piece of digital content may require a substantial allocation of time and/or computing resources. Another shortcoming of conventional watermark processing is that it is difficult for content providers to identify end users who violate the content providers' copyright privileges.
The Internet is increasingly being used as a distribution medium for entertainment content such as movies, music, or other multi-media presentations. At one time, it was predicted that a user would be able to order digital content (e.g., a movie) over the Internet and have it streamed in real-time to their computer. However, systems having sufficient computing capacity to provide an acceptable level of real-time streaming video performance have proven to be too expensive for most users. Additionally, Internet capacity for providing wide scale delivery of streaming video content is, at this time, insufficient. In order to allow distribution of digital content over the Internet, content providers typically rent the content to end users for a specified time period and allow the end users to store the content upon their personal computers so that they can access the digital content later.
Unfortunately, storing digital content upon a user's computer facilitates unauthorized distribution of copies of copyrighted material. For example, a user can easily copy the digital content and inappropriately distribute it over the Internet. Even if the content is encrypted, it can still be stored by the end user. Additionally, to some degree, all encryption is fallible and does not guarantee that an end user could not eventually decrypt, copy, and distribute the content. This could potentially cause copyright holders to lose revenue. Recent court cases show that the entertainment industry is intent upon preventing unauthorized access and copying of their property. At the same time, they want to facilitate distribution of their content to as wide an audience as possible. Therefore, copyright holders are looking for methods of delivering high quality content over the Internet that still protect their copyright privileges.